Crafting 120 Infographics for PROTO

Behind the Scenes: post 3 of 3

· Design,Infographics,startups,Branding

In the 2 weeks since PROTO has launched on Kickstarter, we’ve only focused on the co-creation process of the past 2 years. But actually, a lot of the backers have been talking about the beautiful infographics that illustrate each business model element.

First of all, thanks for noticing! It’s probably not a surprise that we spent a lot of time and effort to achieve this visual look and feel of PROTO:

more than a year experimenting with different styles,

discussing & drafting each of the 120 infographics, and

refining all the little details for each card.

The Challenge: Making Innovation Accessible

We did this because we knew a lot of people might not know all the business terms or technical jargon… PROTO’s audiences are a blend of business and education, so we wanted to make innovation accessible to our users as well. For example, an aspiring entrepreneur might not be familiar with “Fast Follower” or young designer might not have gotten in touch with business terms like “Halo Effect.”

Furthermore, we gave ourselves further constraints in limiting the visual aesthetics; only using a clean, minimalistic, and geometric style.

Repeating these visualizations consistently and cohesively across 4 card types, 120 cards, and still making it work to contribute to the game play became a tremendous challenge. i.e. How do you begin to visualize abstract concepts like “augmented reality,” “fast follower,” or even “charisma”?

The Solution: Inform & Illustrate

While the initial prototypes used plain text and numbers, all the reading felt boring and also slowed the game down. Somewhere along the way, we thought to use infographics, but it was extremely daunting to think of the work required to illustrate so many concepts, so it were temporarily abandoned. So instead, we experimented with draft after draft of beautiful abstract designs, but across so many cards the abstractions blended together and the ideas were lost. We were stuck, but that’s the creative process: endless confusion and uncertainty until a spark of insight.

While one part of our team was working on the aesthetics, another continued to brainstorm and draft infographics. It wasn’t until we finally revisited the infographics and combined the two directions to make each card inform and illustrate the concepts. In this way, the aesthetics clarified the ideas and the ideas guided the aesthetics.

Through PROTO, we at Let’s Make Great! hope to deepen players understanding of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. Whether that’s through the graphics, the text or the game play — everything had to work together to inspire players.

Video Below

PROTO has been a real labor of love for us, something that we’ve worked on in the evenings and weekends. To celebrate this, we’ve just created a NEW 2 minute long video documenting this whole design process. So if you’re into visualizations and infographics, make sure to check out the video where we reveal:

never before seen early drafts of the designs,

explain a bit more about how the designs were conceptualized, and

animate the graphics to further bring the concepts to life.

Final Day: June 3rd

AND… if you haven’t supported this project yet, you still have a few days left. While the campaign is already “successful,” we still want to do better. We want to improve the 4 icon pieces, sand-timers and get really awesome packaging so it looks great on your bookshelf.

Founded in 2013, Let’s Make Great! is an independent creativity consultancy focusing on the next 100 years of innovation in China, helping companies to solve business challenges through the creative process.

Most recently PROTO (Let’s Make Great!’s co-created card game to inspire future innovators) was successfully funded on Kickstarter in less than 2 days.